My dissertation is on the cultural consequences of the westward forced migration of enslaved men and women to the Lower Mississippi Valley during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I hope to contribute to our histories of slavery, race, identity, and capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States and Atlantic World. So far at Rice, I have written on advertisements of slave sales printed in New Orleans newspapers between 1803 and 1815, how enslaved men and women from the Upper South formed identities as "American negroes" in Louisiana's francophone, sugar-growing world, and the transnational imperial roots of the 1850s American Zouave craze. I have also become interested in mapping historical social and cultural data using GIS software.

Biography:

I grew up in New Jersey but left home to attend Tulane University in 2009. I graduated with a B.A. in history in 2013 after writing an honors thesis on the connection between the Medical College of Louisiana and the University of Louisiana, schools that eventually became Tulane, and slavery. My adviser is James Sidbury.